I haven’t much to say except to that what happened in Washington tonight has very probably set off a tinderbox, and we will now be in rebellion. May it be a non-violent one, but if violence is what it ultimately takes, we are a people whose nation is founded on such in the defense of human liberty.
[Monday morning update]
Professor Jacobson has a pep talk.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Paul Hsieh on the coming battles. And Victor Davis Hanson says that Obama has crossed the Rubicon. Fortunately, Julius Caesar he’s not.
[Update a while later]
Had enough?
As I have argued now for months – first, in August, here; then, in November, here and here; and, more recently, here, here, and here – a genuine political realignment may be in the offing. This has happened at irregular intervals in our nation’s past – most notably, in 1800, 1828, 1860, and 1932 – and on each occasion the political party benefiting from the upheaval was able to paint a plausible picture depicting their opponents as being parties to a conspiracy to overthrow the liberties possessed by their fellow Americans. This is what Thomas Jefferson did to the Federalists in and after 1800; it was what Andrew Jackson did to John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Nicholas Biddle, and the Whigs in and after 1828; it was what Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans did to the slave power conspiracy and its fellow travelers in the North in and after 1860, and it was what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did to Herbert Hoover and the business-minded progressives in and after 1932. When FDR claimed, at the 1936 Democratic convention, that “a small group” of his fellow Americans was intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives,” he was merely rephrasing the charges lodged in an earlier time by Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and their political allies.
Of course, one cannot plausibly advance such a claim except in circumstances where one has a great deal of help from one’s opponents. In 1800, Jefferson profited from the quarrel pitting Alexander Hamilton against John Adams, and by exhibiting secessionist propensities at the Hartford Convention, the New England Federalists destroyed their own party. Something similar can be said regarding Nicholas Biddle and the supporters of the Second National Bank. The same is true for the supporters of the slave power in and after 1860, and Herbert Hoover was in similar fashion a godsend for FDR.
If the Republicans have a comparable opportunity in 2010 and 2012, it is because of what I described in my very first blogpost as “Obama’s Tyrannical Ambition.” Barack Obama has a gift. He has told us so himself, and he is right, but he errs in supposing that his oratorical skill will enable him to fool all of the people all of the time, and over time he has, in effect, unmasked his own party as a conspiracy on the part of a would-be aristocracy of do-gooders hostile to very idea of self-government in the United States. There is no need for me to review the record of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress in the last fifteen months. It is enough to say that, in an administration that promised transparency, everything has been negotiated behind closed doors in a manner suggestive of tyranny and that, in an administration that promised to distance itself from the lobbyists, every major bill has been written by them and is loaded with special deals that give new meaning to the old phrase “corrupt bargain.” The stimulus bill, cap-and-trade, healthcare reform: with these Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have brought home to the American people, as never before, the tyrannical propensities inherent in the progressive impulse. Thanks to them, everyone now knows that there is no such thing as a moderate Democrat.
I’m not sure that everyone knows it, but enough to now to make the whirlwind that they’ll reap pretty big in the fall. And perhaps years to come.
[Update a few minutes later]
Another pep talk, from Bill Whittle:
…in terms of limiting the practical and immediate damage, holding it here — just holding it — is important and essential. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have an IQ of 130 — that would be combined between the three of them and you can get to 150 if you throw in Biden — and so they actually believe that a few months from now, they will be able to add single-payer to this goat rodeo, this bloodbath, this circus of incompetence conducted by this museum-grade confederacy of dunces. It got them a bill that requires people to pay for private insurance — which I am, of course, utterly opposed to on every level — but that is way short of single payer and we MUST hold the line here and not an inch further until reinforcements arrive in January. And they will. In numbers that will astonish and amaze the most optimistic among us.
We need to understand the great lesson we have learned about these people in this debate. Barack Obama is, to the liberal cause, a politician that comes not once in a decade, or once in a generation, or even once per century. Barack Obama is, to them, a once in history opportunity for progressives to control this country, and they will fall on a forest of swords to achieve those ends because this is the best chance they have ever had or ever will have to permanently shackle the people to the state. They know that this Health Care fiasco will cost them the House and now perhaps the Senate in November, but that new Congress will not seat until January and in the ten months between now and then they will, I predict, start an orgy of legislation that will make this Health Care circus look like a tea party.
But it seems to me that they have spent every dime of political capital in the bank and have done nothing less than awoken from it’s long and deep slumbers the American Giant, who in attempting to sit upright discovers the Lilliputian threads that have been staked into the ground with finishing nails and who looks around, blinking and disoriented, fatter and softer and much, much poorer than he was when he last opened his eyes back in 1941, but possessed now as then with a terrible anger and capable still of mighty exertions.
So, to the short term: everybody knows that Reid and Pelosi and The Lightworker himself, obviously, are all hoping to use this bill as the foot in the door for the stuff they really want: A single-payer National Health System, or at least the “public option,” which is simply single-payer on the installment plan. We can’t let them get that. Going forward, we can’t let them get single-payer, or cap and trade, or amnesty, or any of it.
We’ll see if their political tone deafness continues.
[Update mid morning]
Another pep talk, from Moe Lane: things we were told we couldn’t do.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jim Treacher says it’s not fair to call this a political Jonestown for the Democrats, because Jim Jones only killed 900 people.